William Baziotes at BlumHelman - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In 1944 indulgent Greenberg declared William Baziotes, along with Pollock "among the six or seven best young painters we possess" In 1947 when individual of his paintings was awarded the Rich-Campana Prize by dint of the Art Institute of Chicago, Baziotes achieved the avant-garde glory of seeing his work attacked in Art Digest for its "bilious color," "sloppy craftsmanship" and "ignorant design." Despite of the like kind credentials, he was denied the canonization eventually accorded Pollock Rothko Newman and other of his of recent origin York contemporaries, perhaps because he not ever fully abandoned figuration or completely dissolved the figure-ground relation into an all-over field.

By no means a retrospective, this exhibition not awayed a group of paintings well chosen to hint continuities in form and contented from the artist's Picassoid pieces of the early '30 to pictures made in a decidedly individual manner of writing in 1962. Girl With Pink Snake (1933) for instance, already exhibits Baziotes's characteristically robust color sense, with bright primaries held in balance by dint of a subtle purple-gray and the sweet bold pink of the snake. The Parachutist (1944) puts curved shapes against a grid, playing mobile black lines against delicate colors that, along with the brushwork, hold the surface alive. The chief sensation evok as the title would propose is of downward floating, of gravity temporarily suspended. A Neo-Classical picture from 1940 not aways a harlequin looking somewhat apprehensively not on to the edge, away from the plump pink nude he has his arm around. Similarly, the repose of the oils shown here, dating from the late '40 to the early '60 combine a figure lower parted to earth with another floating beside or above it. Typically, awkward shapes combine humor with a note of pathos.

Thus The Toys (1952) not absents a sort of love affair between an ungainly black form, planted upon a deep-blue terrace or cropping out whose stony substance is proposeed by lines that seem drawn by the agency of a stylist's pen, and a one-ey white shape floating upon its back in a beautiful pink-green mottl heavens Trance (1953) pairs a dancing figure formed through two crossed leaf or flatworm shapes with a glowing satellite framed by the horns of a dark mountainous vicinity that fills the center of the painting. Intruding into the image from the right cutting side toothed leafy projections add a menacing note.

A latitude of watercolors and gouaches illustrated distinct aspects of Baziotes's manner of writing A set from 1934-36 featured hardy colors, with areas of uncorrupted primaries, and cartoony little characters. In a pair of watercolors made in 1961 and '62 shapes perhaps inspired by means of Matisse cutouts were painted in layers of translucent color. "In my work," the artist wrote one time "next to something beautiful there is something ugly" With the passage of time, what might one time have been ugly here has been absorbed by the agency of period style; what remains of it is enough purposeful awkwardness, oddnes and flashes of violence to imbue the beautiful in Baziotes's work with the faculty of perception of mystery and power he sought

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